Now this is fine if you want people to be able to post without registering. But many boards do not want guests to be able to post. Another aspect of creating a new forum... permissions are set at the forum level and not the category level.

If you have a category that has zero forums in it, the category is not displayed. That works even if the category has private forums. To a non-authorized visitor, the category is empty because they don't have access to the private forums.

Now suppose you want to create a new private forum. For the brief moment in between when you create the forum and you get a chance to update the default permissions, that forum is visible. If a member is online at that time, they will see the new category! This may or may not be an issue for you.

In any case, this simple change will show you how to update your default forum permissions. We set ours like this:

This makes the forum invisible to everyone on the board except for the ADMIN level users. You can change the description, change the permissions, move it up or down in the category order... none of these changes will be visible to "normal" members of your forum. Here's the change.

Those of you that are particularly observant Smile might notice that all of the double quotes " have been replaced by single quotes ' in this update as well. The admin files are - for the most part - written using double quotes for all text strings, and that is not necessary. Double quotes are only used when there are $variables to evaluate within the string. Single quotes are processed faster because they are literal strings with no substitutions.

And here's a bonus change. There has been more than one case where - because of the new defaults - we forgot to go back and update permissions so that "normal" members could see the forum! Embarassed So this additional line will add text to the forum description while viewed on the index.

That's it! Now if you use this MOD to temporarily "hide" your new forums while you adjust permissions and position in your forum list, you won't forget. There should be a nice note automatically added to your forum description that only ADMINs will see. Cool